does anybody know the reason why MakeMusic no longer provides a public available SDK public-facing kit for plugin developers? I asked that question on the facebook board but they didn't gave me reason.

Are there plans to include Jari's JW Lua Plugin officially into Finale? That would explain that.

BestRaphael.

Posted By : Charles Lawrence - 11/1/2016 11:56 AM

Jari can best answer this.

My thoughts. AFAIK, the "public" PDK has not been available since around 1999/2000. I suspect they discontinued it and support due to economic reasons. There are very few plug-in developers. The PDK is available, if you want to pay the price. Jari uses it in the development of his JW Lua plugin. I doubt it will ever be included in the Finale bundle.

"There is a world of difference between a person who has a big problem and a person who makes a problem big." – John Maxwell

Posted By : jange - 11/23/2016 7:01 AM

I have asked MM several times (I spoke with Mark Adler, Michael Johnson and Michael Good), if I can get their PDK for developing/supporting my announced plugins on elbsound.studio/finale-plugins.php.Even though MakeMusic has known my prototypes which were written in Jari's JW Lua for more than one year, they still don't really want to support the project. Or let's say it like this: they were happy that I started to develop plugins for Finale, but didn't want me to do it with their PDK. Hm... ?Their answer was that they don't give out the plugin PDK to new developers anymore and that I should stick to JW Lua. Although this would mean: slow processing speed, no real integration into Finale possible, limited access to OS properties (e.g. required for font handling) and dependency on Jari's further developments which have stopped for more than one year now.Only the developers that already had developed for Finale in the past still receive updates of their PDK (Jari Williamsson, Tobias Giesen and Robert Patterson).

My preferred solution which I also suggested to Jari Williamsson would be:If Jari made the current release of his Finale PDK Framework open source which he had done with his 2012 release and what he also mentioned in a JW Lua mailing list post from October 2015, I think there would be no reasons anymore for MM for holding back their PDK. MM's biggest fear is probably: extensive technical support for new developers. But firstly: it's up to MM if they gave support or not (and if they don't give support, that would be absolutely ok for me).Secondly I assume that JW Lua scripts can be easily transformed to Jari's C++ framework, so that the software developer would more or less only have to deal with Jari's PDK interface and not with MakeMusic's interface which is indeed rather difficult to work with. So the JW Lua mailing list could still be the center for technical support, exchanging ideas and talking about problems/bugs.And most of all: we could all contribute to Jari's framework which probably would speed up the process of creating a great plug-in platform for Finale.

Nevertheless, JW Lua is already a very impressive platform for small plugins.But I am really missing a roadmap ...

This is bizarre and alarming behaviour from MM. The combination of JW and Tobias plug-ins makes using Finale a complete pleasure. Struggling without either of these (as a Mac user) on F25.2 feels like working under molasses.

If MM keeps refusing, like this, to actively support the incredible work of JW and TG, then they need to man up and provide all of the same functionality OUT OF THE BOX within FInale, and stop relying on the kindness of strangers to do their work for them.